Monday, January 5, 2026
Well, here we are again talking about that delayed first trek of the year. If you haven’t read through the first chapter, I’ll give you a moment to catch up. You might have guess from the title to this blog that things are about to get involved. As I had mentioned, I had started out the day with expectations of possibly shooting four different locations. The first one worked out very nicely and got me going for the new year. The weather was still good, and I was looking for another spot to shoot, so I went out to Lenoir. While I didn’t get the permission to access the property, I finally made contact with someone related to the property, so I can now hold out hope that something will work out in the near future with the location.
When we last spoke, I was pulling out of the driveway in Lenoir and was heading North again. I was looking for a parking lot so that I could make another call to the guy in Elkin about the cars that he had listed for sale a few days prior. I had been unsuccessful at contacting him thus far but figured that I would try again with the conditions looking good. Once I found a parking lot, I pulled out the message thread that had his information and dialed the number. To my surprise the line picked up on the other end, and I was talking to a person rather than just an answering machine. It was hard to understand him, but I found out that he was the guy I was looking to talk with. I explained why I was calling and he quickly informed me that the cars had all sold. I figured that it wouldn’t take long because the price seemed really quite low for what was out there. At any rate, this location was no longer an option as the cars had been rehomed. There is every chance that I will run into them again during my travels though, so all is not lost.
I was running out of spots to shoot, and I contemplated turning home and getting started with the processing. Looking back this would have been the most efficient use of the time as I do enjoy treks that are shot, processed, and blogged in the same day. Yet here we are two days later looking at a newly published blog from the day. You can deduce how the day was about to go from that one little detail. The day had started off decent with the Studebaker, and honestly it was as good a first shoot of the year as I would expect. I just wasn’t quite satisfied with what I had accomplished and wanted to try some more things out.
As I mentioned in my last Behind the Camera, and through the Top 12 Images of the year, one of the things that I am wanting to work on this year is seeing things differently. I’m really wanting to get into some more abstract and detail work with my photography in addition to getting more versed on using a wide-angle lens for things other than landscape photos. Those two goals that I have unofficially set for myself don’t necessarily go together and will force me to look at things quite a bit different than I have in the past. I don’t really have a plan for making that happen except for just keeping my eyes open for the possibilities along the way. That worked out great when I was wanting to work more with black and white photography a couple of years ago. One thing that I took from that experience, is that it is easier to learn to see things in a different way when you are going to a place that you are very familiar with and will be actively looking for new ways to capture some of the same scenes.
One of the places that I was wanting to potentially go was out to Outlawed Restorations in East Bend. I’ve been going here very regularly since 2018 when I stumbled onto the property when I saw a white firetruck sitting by a barn. That chance visit turned into a great friendship and many return visits. I’ve even hosted workshops at this location for many years spreading the joy of decay photography to many other photographers. With my familiarity of the property, it seemed like a great chance to try some different things and see if I could start this period of growth for the year. I also knew that there was every chance that I was going to be here for a while as I can’t just shoot a handful of photos and leave. It is quite literally the spot that just keeps on giving which is evident from this first trek of the year back in 2024. That four-part blog was a huge start to the year, and it was from a place that I had shot dozens of times already. Did it have any more to offer me? I was certain that there were still some tricks up its sleeves.
I set my course to the East and followed the clouds into East Bend. When I pulled into the driveway, I didn’t see Dean’s truck but went to check the shop anyway. The door was locked. Dean has said many times that I can come and shoot whenever I feel like it, so that wasn’t a problem for me. I went back to the truck to get the camera but was met with another truck pulling into the driveway. They struck up a conversation with me and were looking for Dean. I let them know that he was out probably to get some lunch and would be back soon. They told me what they were needing, and since I was still feeling like I should let him know I was out here, I texted him about his customers and that I was there. Sure enough, he was gone for about an hour but would be back to talk with them after that. They were happy with that and decided to come back later in the day.
Once I had the camera out of the truck, I started to walk around the property to see what was different. I wanted to really look at the firetruck which was supposed to be in for a complete makeover, but that has been on the books now for about three years with the customer continually putting it off. I’m certainly not mad at that fact because the truck is just awesome and so much fun to shoot. It is really showing the signs of decay more and more these days which is great for the photography, but it is getting a little beyond what the original build was waiting for. Think rat rod firetruck on a slammed frame with gobs of power under the hood. I’ve been looking forward to this build for quite some time, but I’m starting to really wonder if it will ever get started. I know that the frame is in the shop and ready to receive the body, but that is as far as it has gotten.
The firetruck didn’t really throw out any ideas right off, so I kept looking around. Not too far off was Dean’s dad’s Ford which had been pulled out of the woods a couple of years ago after a tree had fallen and broken the rear window. It was now sitting just as pretty as you please under a lone tree. I’ve been out several times to photograph this car after having been moved, but I’ve usually been in less-than-ideal lighting for the compositions that I wanted to make with it. I had the light this time with the thick overcast. This created nice soft shadows which didn’t hide any of the details of the car. The dormant vegetation around the car was not the best thing as a good Fall Day with colorful leaves around the car would make for a better photo. The lighting was good enough to convince me to give this one a try though, and that was just what I set out to do.
With the sky kind of bland with the overcast, I didn’t really want to use a wide-angle approach. I figured a telephoto shot would be better suited for how everything was looking. I got the camera built up and found a spot at a distance from the car which would give me the framing that I was after. I only needed a couple of attempts at getting this one right since I had shot this same composition before. It was that thought that kind of kicked me in the pants though. I was out here to try different things, and here I was repeating exactly what I had done before. I needed to break that routine and decided that I would go with the detail shots for a while to see if I could see those differently.
I had the right lens for the detail work and walked all around the car in an attempt to find something interesting to shoot. The more I looked, the less I saw. The only thing that jumped out at me was the hood ornament which I had shot before, but remembered there being a slight angle issue that I had spotted after the fact. It was lacking the separation that I would have normally found. I had the long lens and the time, so I went to reshoot that hood ornament one more time.
Yes, I was falling back into the routine of shooting the same things in the same way. I mean, a square crop of a hood ornament is one of my staples and I have a ton of those in my collection. I needed to find something else to focus on. This car was situated in the perfect location away from everything else which gave me tons of opportunities to find different compositions. Why was I having such a hard time with it? I went to the front corner and stopped myself as I was framing up the same composition that I have shot of this car and many others. In order to see differently, I was going to have to change something with the camera. It was time to pull out the wide-angle lens and see what avenues that opened up for me.
At first it seemed like too much lens for me, and it was including way too much of the scene. I kept zooming it in to the 35mm mark and wanting more but had to stop and think about the strengths of this lens and how I use it in the landscape. Also, I started to think about how I had used it with great success during 2025 dealing with subjects in crowded locations in order to fill the frame with that subject. It started to come together for me, and I moved in closer to the car which changed the perspective quite a bit. This was what I was needing to see happen.
With the camera elevated above my eye level, I was able to frame the car in a very flattering way with the lens racked out to the wider end of the focal lengths. I could see the sky, but it wasn’t taking up too much of the frame which kept it from being a distraction because of how bright it was. The tree was visible to the right of the car as was the tree line well in the distance. It was that distance that allowed me to separate the car from the distant trees. Compare the first shot with this one to see what the difference is between 88mm and 20mm. It took a bit more thought to organize the elements within the scene, but the wider lens seemed to simplify the overall composition quite well.
It took a bit of work to figure out the exposure because of the sky. While there was no detail in the clouds, I still didn’t want the sky to be totally white which would add too much contrast to the top portion of the frame. I reduced the exposure so that there was still color detail in the sky while leaving enough room in the shadows to work with the car. Yeah, I could have used a grad filter and have done that with similar compositions of this car, but I didn’t want to lose the detail in the trees which made me really have to concentrate on getting this without darkening the top portion of the photo. The histogram was telling me that I had plenty of room at both ends to get the detail that I wanted in post, so I was pretty sure that was going to work.
As I looked at the photos coming in on the image review, I was judging them for ways to improve the composition. There were so many aspects of the composition that I loved, but it seemed to lack something dramatic. With the flat light from the clouds, there wasn’t much drama in the scene which did allow me to shoot from any angle that I wanted, but I needed some more dimension to the scene, something to really set the photo off. That something was the tree that was behind the car.
The tree stood very tall behind the Ford and while the trunk offered plenty of interesting detail, it was the skeletal structure of it as it went into the sky above that was even more interesting. With my position close in on the car, I was looking up through the tree rather than from the side. This gave that main structure separation from the background trees which made it even more impressive. Knowing that I had an exposure that was going to work for the sky and the car, I flipped the camera and worked out that composition for a bit.
I ended up getting in a bit closer and opened the lens up to 18mm. The car took on even more of a distorted look that added interest to the front end while the tree was fully separated from the car and the background. There was a balance between the subjects with the common thread being the bed of leaves that the car was sitting on. This was the shot that I was after, and the conditions and the lens made it possible. It was the moment that the creativity kicked in, and I started to think differently about the different subjects that were here.
With that realization, I started to move on to some other vehicles in the same general area. The first one that I went to was a Plymouth that was a new addition a couple of years ago. This car was kind of situated by itself and I had done several good compositions of it. I was now looking at using the wide-angle lens for a change and started to explore the angles. The easiest angle was from the driver’s side which I started with. There was nothing beyond the car from this angle and there was also a nice arched branch above the car that framed it nicely. This had been used in a number of previous photos of the car, but with the thinning trees and the overcast sky, I ended up with a void in the top left of the frame unless I chose an angle that didn’t really suit the car for this lens. I wasn’t sure about shooting from the other side even though it had the benefit of the wheel being turned in the right direction for a shot from that corner.
The problem that I was seeing from the passenger side was that there was no way to avoid including a Chevy pickup that was a couple of car lengths away that led into a string of other trucks along the tree line. I had dealt with this issue by using the telephoto lens on one of the last times that I shot this car and kept the scaling between the trucks similar thanks to the compression from the telephoto lens. I actually included three trucks in that composition, and it looked like they were all there having a friendly meeting. That was more like how I was used to seeing things and decided that I wanted to try something different, especially since I had the wide-angle lens on the camera.
I started to look at things and realized that I could effectively cut out the third truck with cropping by getting in close to the Plymouth and having the Chevy in the distance kind of fill a background role. There was no bed on that truck, so I just wanted to use the cab in the shot which was multi-colored. The dark cab was used to provide a bit of highlight to the driver’s headlight bucket since it would be surrounded by darkness. The red and white front clip added just a bit of interest in the background but still blended in with the warm colors of the grasses. The main focus of the shot was the nose of the Plymouth that was looking really prominent in the frame. This was the kind of shot that I was looking to do more of this year and it was starting to work out.
The question that I was left with at this point was could my two goals be related in some fashion. Shooting wide and looking for more creative detail shots seemed to be two different ends of the spectrum, but could it be possible to change up my detail shots with a different lens. It wasn’t that long ago, that I pulled out the telephoto lens for the first time to get some up-close details shots and proved that a lens that was supposed to reach out and capture something from a distance was good up close as well. It defined a year of learning that lens and I’m still enjoying what I have found out from that exploration. Now that I have my sights on a different lens, could that help rewrite my isolation shots as well?
Familiarity can often breed creativity and with that in mind, I went over to the Chevy truck that had been in the background of the Plymouth shot. This truck had been here for a number of years, and I had photographed it many times. I’ve even shot it with a different front clip because the original one here was used on a firetruck restoration that Dean did a few years back. The panels on this truck were in better shape than the firetruck, so they were swapped. The result was a front clip that contrasted beautifully with the darker and cooler colors of the cab. Because of the colors, this truck has been the subject of one of my favorite compositions many times over. It is a straight on shot that includes the fender, the vent on the cowl, and the hood framing the emblem. I’ve even adapted that composition for use with the telephoto lens at an angle for some added interest. Could I do something with the wide lens now that I had it on the camera?
I started to look around to find an angle that worked and still kept things organized well in the frame. Surprisingly, a very similar angle worked with the wide lens and by going slightly off axis to the side of the truck, I was able to get the shape of the nose in the shot as well. I liked what I was seeing and decided to fine tune this in order to minimize the distractions in the background. That is the tradeoff with a lens like this, you will get more background, and you have to be careful about what appears in the frame. It was going to be worth it for the perspective that it introduced to the nose of the truck which made this almost an abstract view of a familiar scene.
It didn’t take long, and I had the angles figured out and was able to get the shot. Looking at it on the LCD during the image review I felt that it worked amazingly well. That answered the question of whether or not this lens would work in a similar type of situation as the standard and the telephoto lens. I was a little surprised, but it worked much better than I expected. I was motivated to look for different angles to see just what I could do with this lens. I must have looked funny picking the camera and tripod up waving it around as I was looking through the viewfinder to see how things looked with the perspective distortion that was introduced with this lens. It just isn’t the way that we see as humans, and it takes a little while to calibrate your eyes to seeing in such a way. I guess more accurately “imagining” what a scene would look like with a wide-angle lens.
With all the moving around that I was doing with the camera, I found that a look from the top down was also quite pleasing and introduced yet another angle to a very familiar scene. I started to get the tripod lined up with where the camera needed to be before finding the composition again. From there, it was all about fine tuning where the elements were and how I wanted to frame it. This was actually a lot of fun because this section of these trucks, while always a favorite of mine, has become boring over the years. I’ve shot compositions around this part of the different trucks so much I can do it in my sleep. This was something completely new though, and very welcome to the day.
This is the kind of thing that I was hoping to develop through the year. It is a new way of seeing, and surprisingly I’ve found that my two goals for the year are actually closer related than I had given credit for. I really thought that the wide lens was going to be great for some different perspectives on full subjects, and I would work the abstract isolations with the other lenses. Here I was using a wide-angle lens for close in isolation work and it was working so well! I doubt that I ever would have tried this without actively thinking about seeing things differently. It has opened my eyes up to new possibilities and I really like the potential that I am seeing. Who knows, by the end of the year, the 16-35mm might just be my most used lens, replacing the telephoto which has been king for the last two years.
If you know me at all, you will know that having these kinds of revelations during a session will prompt me to keep going. You obviously see that we are coming to the close of this entry though which seems like I am stopping just when things are getting good. That isn’t the case at all. In fact, there are still a bunch more photos to come, but you will have to be patient and wait for volume two which I’ll have published tomorrow. The real questions is…just how many more photos do I have from this location? Stay tuned, and you will find out.
See you tomorrow….
